When the IRA came to take Jean McConville away in 1972, it was a murderous week in a bloody and awful year, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor.
In 1972, David Bowie and T Rex and Slade and glitter rock were all the rage. Paul McCartney was also on the road with his new band, Wings, singing Give Ireland Back to the Irish.
In December that year, The Godfather and Dirty Harry were running in the cinemas. The serialised dramatisation of Tolstoy's War and Peace was featuring on RTÉ and BBC. Parents were calling their baby girls Natasha on the back of it.
In 1972, Northern Ireland exploded into a horrific year of slaughter and political disintegration, the worst year of the Troubles when almost 500 people died. Remember Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, Claudy, the collapse of Stormontand Jean McConville.
On December 7th, 1972, IRA men and women came to her flat in Divis in the Lower Falls area of Belfast to take her away, question her, shoot her dead, and finally dispose of her body. It wasn't until the New Year of 1973 that word filtered out about her disappearance.
She was a Protestant disowned by her family for marrying a Catholic, Arthur McConville. A widow and a mother in straitened circumstances - her husband died 11 months before her - her abduction made the news at the time, but it did not grip the public or media imagination as it did after a form of peace finally came to Northern Ireland through the IRA ceasefire of August 31st, 1994. There was time to focus on the "disappeared" after 1994 but in 1972 there was just so much to cover, so much death.
Jean McConville was wrestled away from her terrified and despairing 10 children on December 7th. In those first seven days of that month, 12 other people died by bullet, bomb and knife. It was a barbarous period. Some people want or tend to forget that time. Probably half the population wasn't even born 31 years ago. But for many others, that period is ingrained on their souls.
At least, every reasonable person hopes, the McConvilles can bring something approximating peace to their lives now. It will take DNA tests to provide final proof that the remains found on Shelling Hill beach are those of Jean McConville. After seeing the clothes found on Thursday, the McConvilles appeared convinced that they can now give their mother a Christian funeral.
They went through a roller coaster of emotions on Shelling Hill beach: the memories of the IRA gang dragging her mother away; of the children pleading with them to let her go; the chilling thought of how she died, an IRA bullet to the back of her head after a kangaroo court - all these thoughts must have come flooding back. Hardly surprising, therefore, that the McConvilles took time to compose themselves before speaking to reporters on Thursday from the beach site.
Journalist Ed Moloney in his book A Secret History of the IRA, claimed it was "inconceivable" that the Sinn Féin president, Mr Gerry Adams, as an alleged IRA leader in Belfast at the time did not know about Ms McConville's abduction. It was a claim that Mr Adams denied and rejected as outrageous.
Michael McConville, her son, was in no mood to engage in recrimination. He said he forgave her killers but he again discounted the allegations that the IRA killed her because she was an informer.
"I was angered at the way they killed my mother, and at the way they told all the lies, spread all the rumours about her...yes I have been angry at that. They were telling us she was an informer, just tarnishing her name. Everybody out there knows fine rightly that this is untrue. The reason that they killed my mother was because she went to help a British soldier [who was lying wounded outside her home in west Belfast]," said Mr McConville.
"Plus the fact that she was a Protestant didn't help either," he added.
The items of clothing found in the shallow grave convinced the family that the remains were their mother's. In particular they recognised the jumper she was wearing.
Now the family hope they can bring some closure to a terrible time - and it was a terrible time. A check through Irish Times Belfast cuttings and records and the book Lost Lives brings back some of that relentless roll call of death and destruction. Even looking back to the first seven days of December 1972, when Jean McConville was "disappeared", illustrates the particular horror of the early troubles.
On December 1st, CIÉ busmen George Bradshaw and Thomas Duffy died when a bomb exploded at Sackville Place, off O'Connell Street in Dublin. The explosion coincided with a debate on tougher emergency legislation in the Dáil that could have precipitated a general election if it wasn't passed.
Loyalist paramilitaries were blamed although suspicion also fell on British military intelligence, possibly acting to ensure the safe passage of the contentious Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill. With word of the bombing the Opposition Fine Gael rallied behind the legislation.
The following day the naked body of 32-year-old Catholic Patrick Liam Benstead was found in east Belfast, a suspected victim of the loyalist Ginger Baker gang. A cross was burned onto his back with the letters IRA beside it.
The same day 26-year-old Sandra Meli, a Protestant from east Belfast married to a Catholic was shot dead by the UDA. The day after 30-year-old Protestant Samuel James Hamilton was shot dead, most likely by the IRA.
On December 4th 16-year-old IRA member Bernard Samuel Fox was shot dead by British soldiers in the Ardoyne area of north Belfast. On December 5th, there were three separate deaths: William Bell, a Protestant from north Belfast shot by the British army when mistaken for a gunman; British soldier Roy Hill, killed in an explosion in Armagh while defusing an IRA mortar bomb; UDR soldier William Bogle, shot dead by the IRA in his car in Killeter, Co Tyrone, his wife and children beside him.
The following day Samuel White, a Protestant from east Belfast, was found with bullet and stab wounds in the nationalist Short Strand area, killed by republicans in a suspected sectarian attack.
On December 7th, a senior figure in the UDA, Ernest Elliott from south Belfast, was found in the south of the city, apparently killed by his colleagues.
That was also the day they came for Jean McConville.